Literary Criticism
Edited by Harish Trivedi
The first section presents A Passage to India through translations in various languages, and film and stage adaptations, thereby building a memorable montage that the novel inspires. The opening essay is by a novelist, Anjum Hasan, and begins delightfully with Forsterian language that a child heard from a Forster-devotee father and didn’t know what it meant! The personal and the political merge over time and the book gains complex meaning for Anjum even as the heavily marked pages are, by then, being carried around the parental home in a plastic bag (p.
12). From that, we move swiftly to a bilingual essay by Rupert Snell ‘On Translating A Passage into Hindi’ based on an experiment with six Indian translators that yielded an astonishing variety of ‘equivalent terminology’ even with the title of the book.
Edited by Usha Akella
As Adil Jussawalla points out, Keki Daruwalla’s works are ‘as relevant today as when they were first published (in 1970)’ (p. 59). Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca relays, ‘Mature poetic talent…literary stamina, intellectual strength and social awareness’ (p. 72), even in the poet’s debut collection, left an impression on Nissim Ezekiel. The ‘caustic’ and ‘incisive’ writing (p. 105) that shapes much of the poet’s oeuvre,
Edited by Amit Chaudhuri
I was eventually drawn to novels through exceptional paragraphs cited in essays. By my late teens, I was probably more likely to read a piece of criticism about a work rather than the work itself. His insight about novels is something which hard working teachers in their classes do not want their students to develop. Gratified with his epiphany, Chaudhuri looked for standalone paragraph(s) in novels which ‘belongs to a story but is also independent of it, in that it seems equally located in an irreducible life and textuality outside that novel as it is in the life narrated and contained within it’.
Edited and translated from the original Kannada into Sanskrit and English by Mangesh Venkatesh Nadkarni
A noteworthy section in the Introduction is: ‘Vacana Dharma and Hinduism’. Nadkarni shows here how the basic beliefs and practices of Vīraśaiva-Lingāyats are to be traced to Hinduism. For example, the idea of One God is very much there in the Rigveda (Ekam Sad viprāhbahudhāvadanti, etc.). The practice of chanting the holy mantra of ‘Om Namah Śivāya’ is from Hinduism.